


we'll leave our tracks untraceable

by confused_android



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Bickering, F/M, Female Newton Geiszler, Gender Issues, Growing Old Together, Grumpy Hermann Gottlieb, Hermann is Bad at Feelings, MIT, Newt is a Dork, Newt is a Dyke, Post-Movie, Science, Slapstick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 09:46:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5329571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confused_android/pseuds/confused_android
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she steps off the plane in Logan International, something tight in her shoulders cracks, loosens, and she shakes free the last barb the PPDC had through her spine, through her brain, keeping her tense and wary for most of a decade. She yanks her heavy suitcase off of the carousel, identifiable by the years of layered duct tape repairing a seam that could once have been stitched, and flags the first taxi that will stop for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we'll leave our tracks untraceable

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Sons & Daughters,' by The Decemberists

They save the world. 

Later, when they’ve finished writing reports in triplicate for the PPDC, when they finish the lecture tour, when they’ve finished giving interviews (that part is a lie; they’re never finished giving interviews. They just give interviews about new and more significant discoveries and breakthroughs instead of about the Kaiju War), that’s what ten years of work boils down to: they save the world. 

In return, the world rebuilds. January 12th is declared a global holiday, and the non-Pacific nations spend five years carrying the global economy and organizing relief efforts to rebuild an entire ocean’s worth of coastal cities. The global market spikes, then plunges, then climbs steadily for the next decade as production of luxury items, of toys, of clothes picks back up. Supermarkets offer varied choices once more, research teams pour thousands of collective hours into decontaminating radioactive and dead bodies of water, fishing becomes a viable food supply again (but it takes ages for the stigma surrounding possibly radioactive fish to fade).

The world spends a decade saving itself, and Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler save each other.

Academia suits Newt in a way that the military never had. She had been constrained and compressed in the PPDC, but there was no escaping from a strict hierarchical system, even for a genius. Scheduled meetings, dress codes, salutes and useless formalities had never sat well with her, and it didn’t sit well with those higher in the chain of command when she requisitioned lab space at three in the morning, when she put herself in the medical wing time and time again running tests that prioritized speed over safety (but it had to be said that she never let any of her staff take the physical damage or the flak from higher-up), when she worked for three days straight and then slept through mandatory meetings. K-Science occupied a strange middle ground between the global research community and the military, and Newt itched under the collar every time she had to explain herself to a commander who didn’t understand the basic framework of her research, let alone the theories she was proposing, expanding, too late in her budget to test out. 

Working at MIT feels like coming home for Newt. Well, it is a literal homecoming – she’d left MIT to work with the fledgling jaeger program nine years earlier – but when she steps off the plane in Logan International, something tight in her shoulders cracks, loosens, and she shakes free the last barb the PPDC had through her spine, through her brain, keeping her tense and wary for most of a decade. She yanks her heavy suitcase off of the carousel, identifiable by the years of layered duct tape repairing a seam that could once have been stitched, and flags the first taxi that will stop for her. “Home,” she gasps after heaving her suitcase into the trunk, and then, half laughing at herself, she corrects, “MIT. Take me to MIT,” and clarifies the address once they’re moving. 

She moves into a small house near Donnelly Field because it’s the perfect distance from campus – close enough to walk to work in nice weather and have her favorite students over for dinner, but far enough into the residential neighborhood that it feels like she’s actually leaving once she’s gone home. When she goes home.

She requests a full course load the minute she accepts MIT’s offer of employment (over Harvard, Berkley, and Oxford, to name only the most tempting competing offers), and insists on teaching a freshman bio seminar every semester along with her graduate classes. She advises twice as many students as most of the other bio-tech professors, and conducts research in her very own lab, with the help of the best and the brightest on the PhD track. There’s no shortage of work to be done on the leftover kaiju samples, (and she gets all of them, from every decommissioned K-tech lab, to dole out to other universities and laboratories as she pleases. There are a lot of fruit baskets gifted to her department that first year; that’s cool, Newt loves pineapple.) but the further research made capable by nine years of work in xenobiology is staggering. She starts projects, drags in graduate students, sets them up for research and trials, and moves on to the next big idea. They’re working with neuron repair, nerve growth, optic enhancement, bone reinforcement, skin graft improvements, and they’re literally only limited by space, time, and the number of hands available. Newt starts saying fuck it to the normal chain of publishing, and starts thrusting her research out to any university that wants it – she doesn’t get first name in the journals when they finally do publish, but everyone knows where the concepts are coming from, springing from, pouring from, and it’s the advancements in medical technology and rehabilitation that she cares about, not some bullshit number she can put next to her name. There is literally too much she is discovering to be able to see it all through from start to finish. 

Newt is a rockstar. She always knew she was a rockstar: when she played bass in a band, when she learned how to go down on a man, and then a woman, when she got pranked by her students and got them back twice as hard, when the PPDC came calling, emailing, and picked her up on a Wednesday to fly her to Lima, when she saved the world. It is no surprise to her that she is an international sensation. So she gets invitations to present at conferences worldwide, to give guest lectures, to teach at other universities. Her favorites are podcasts, fan-made monster magazines (thought of as being in poor taste for a while, but Godzilla will never not be awesome), and one particularly memorable Ted talk (to be fair, she did warn them). 

She stops even trying to make her hair lay flat and she rolls up the sleeves of her button-down shirts to show off her tattoos. Her ties get knotted more and more sloppily (or become more and more memorable, when she and another professor buy each other ties of increasing garishness through two hilarious semesters). She covers each “Dr. Nora Geiszler” with a sticky note that says “Dr. Newton Geiszler” in increasingly bolded sharpie, until she storms into HR and leaves with the promise of new plaques on her office and lab doors. She gets them. Honestly, does she look like a Nora to you?

When she does manage to leave campus (or is forcibly ejected by her department chair, after a few eighty-hour weeks), her boots relearn Cambridge, Somerville, Davis Square, visiting old friends, new colleagues, dive bars, dyke bars. She walks as far as Medford without a blister and fondly polishes her doc martens that night, doesn’t scuff them up again for days.

It’s busy, those first few years.

She and Hermann are close – how could they not be? They shared their brains with each other, dude, they have no old secrets, no fears un-touched by the all-encompassing WE of a hive-mind and a stereoscopic rig. They create and hide new secrets after that, but that doesn’t lessen the ones they’ve already shared. He’s ostensibly working for Oxford, but spends all of his time guest lecturing and teaching world-wide. It takes two years of that before he just sends all of his belongings to Cambridge, to Newt’s house, where she piles them in the basement and a spare room (aspirationally decked out with a kneeling chair and a chalkboard), and he swings by for a weekend every month or two to change out the contents of his suitcase and drink scotch with Newt as they share their most recent adventures. Not that they aren’t talking on the phone, by webcam, by holographic interface when it becomes public use, several times a week. If Newt is up at three am in Cambridge, slamming through DNA sequences in a half-lit lab, it’s only because Hermann’s got the afternoon off in New Delhi, and he’s arguing with her while he scribbles furiously on a white board in an empty classroom at Indraprastha Institute. 

He sends her pictures of Vanessa and their daughter, Anya. They’re living with Vanessa’s boyfriend and his wife in Stratham, happy as four bugs in a rug in their cozy home, full of books and paints and plants and windows overlooking the Commons. He and Vanessa don’t get divorced – they love each other, and it seems impractical – but their love slowly shifts to the overwhelming affection of best friends who’ve made a child together, and Vanessa doesn’t resents his absences. Anya, on the other hand, spends a month when she’s four throwing tantrums, and Hermann takes that year and spends all of his downtime in England, doting on her and reassuring her that he loves her despite his inability to be present in her life as much as her mother. He has a quiet conversation with Vanessa one night, soon after Anya starts walking, where he promises to get a job in London and move closer if she and Anya need him too. He doesn’t forget that promise, and Vanessa always keeps it in the back of her mind, just in case they do need it.

Newt misses him that year, but she understands. She’s never felt the biological urge to procreate, but Anya is a cute kid, with Vanessa’s dark skin and curly hair, and Herman’s sharp nose and unamused scowl. Thankfully, she takes after her mother and smiles easily, new teeth shining every time Newt sees a picture. Newt would wonder what Vanessa ever saw in Hermann as a husband, but she suspects she knows what Vanessa saw, that she sees it, that it was always there, lingering at the corners of her eyes when they fought and spat in a windowless room with a drain in the floor.

Which isn’t to say that their fights end. After the apocalypse gets cancelled, they spend a tentative year not-fighting, testing out the borders and boundaries of a sudden truce, splashed over them like ice water. Newt screams less that year, but she also gets less done. Hermann gets caught in the middle of his work, chews furiously at his thin lips and worries at the cuffs of his ill-fitting jackets. They’re talking late one night, Newt reviewing her TAs’ work with one hand and tapping pensively away at a grant proposal with the other, when Hermann cautiously, slyly, flicks a barb her way. Newt bares her teeth, slams down her pen, screeches back at him, but when they finally hang up the phone, she dives into her work with a new fervor. 

It’s bad when they fight – lab students retreat, caution each other with a “don’t go in there, man, it’s dangerous” – but it’s just so good. 

Newt limits herself – usually – to comments about Hermann’s work, his math, his number of recent publications, or to topical insults. She’s obnoxious, shouting at the phone in fits of rage or mania, teasing him about his clothes and the stupid cover of his book, or his adherence to a field that isn’t going anywhere, isn’t making drastic improvements to the world around him. He saved the world, and now he’s spending all of his time chasing numbers in fractal spirals down into useless minutia. Hermann is a cold bastard, though, and hits her where it hurts. Her lack of a social life, her name (she never legally changed it to Newton, and she’s waiting until her father dies to do it), how she’s stopped caring about her rockstar persona and looks like a shlub (okay, the ties are a deliberate fashion choice, but he’s not wrong about that one), how she works too much to keep close friends, partners. 

She’s obnoxious, but he’s nasty.

 

He’s over for an entire week in January of 2030 to celebrate Breach Day with MIT when he cuts her and hits bone. It’s snippy and unnecessary, and it’s only because she’s called him out on his current project, labels it a mathematical circle-jerk, says it’s “fascinating, I’m sure, if you get hard for numbers. Remind me what practical applications your zeros have?” and makes an exaggerated snoring noise. Hermann pinches back, twists, says that at least he can get hard, calls her ‘mannish’ and suggests that it’s the only way she manages to grasp power, hold onto it with her short, ragged fingernails. He’s been in her brain, that’s what makes it worse. He knows it’s not entirely dysphoria, but practicality and comfort, only a small amount of anger at the weaknesses her body shows. That she wears sports bras and boxer-briefs so her button-down shirts will fit, that her thighs will be comfortable in the men’s pants with the dropped crotch. She gets mistaken for male on a weekly basis, and it feels like victory every time. Okay, so maybe there’s some gender dysphoria going on, but it’s not that she hates her woman’s body, but that she loves her man’s body just a little bit more.

Newt bares her teeth at him, throws her drink on the floor of her small, cluttered living room and leaves him to clean up the spilled beer, the unbroken bottle. She leaves for work before he even wakes up the next morning – did she sleep? Survey says: no – and when he gets to campus to sit in on her lecture (a winter series, presented over the break), it takes a moment to identify the woman at the lectern. She looks like a pin-up from the rockabilly resurgence twenty years earlier, she looks like Ruby Rose. Her dark hair is slicked back, her lipstick is blood-of-my-enemies red, and her dress, while perfectly appropriate for an educational setting, has nips and darts in such cunning places as to make her comfortable figure, never especially generous in the breast-department, look voluptuous. She’s just this side of chubby, she’s zaftig, and it looks good. Hermann clears his throat uncomfortably and laces his fingers over the head of his cane, tucked between his knees. A student across the aisle whispers to his friend “I had a wet dream like this, once,” and Hermann has to resist cuffing him, settles for a glower.

Newt is a dynamic professor and stalks up and down the room, calling out questions and darting back to the white board to scrawl, illegibly, the names of various chemicals and compounds, before heading back up the aisles, climbing steps to pick on students in the back. Her heels are emerald green, and they match the color in her tattoos, visible to the knee and almost all the way up her arms. When she turns to write, Hermann can see color on the back of her neck, and it isn’t a blush. He’s surprised that she doesn’t totter, doesn’t tiptoe around like a teenager in her mother’s heels, but has a flash of memory of her college years, somewhere between doctorates three and five, and a closet full of short skirts and stiletto heels.

When class is over, when her students have finished goggling and have filed out from the lecture, Newt doesn’t wait for Hermann and strides down the hall, up a flight of stairs, and towards the wing with the graduate laboratories. By the time Hermann makes it, there is only the tail end of some ribbing from her students left in the air, and Newt is toeing off her heels to slip into a pair of black sneakers, sockless. With her lab coat left unprofessionally unbuttoned, as usual, she looks like she’s in some pornographic film set in a laboratory. 

Hermann leaves and camps out in a library for the rest of the afternoon, a tension headache radiating from his tight shoulders.

He and Newt don’t meet up again before the Bio Engineering department get-together (it’s only the 10th of the month, but there are plans to celebrate all week, especially with two of the Breach Day heroes in the same location), and by the time he shows up at Professor Durkin’s house (a large Victorian with a generous backyard and a deep wraparound porch), Newt has already been there for an hour. Despite some of Hermann’s jabs, Newt is well-liked by her coworkers, all of whom are all well-aware that when Hermann is in town, he and Newt are usually inseparable. He smells a plot when, the moment he walks into the house, one of Newt’s colleagues quickly presses a drink into her hands. She raises the plastic cup to her lips and drinks it down in one long swallow, eyes locked on Hermann as he stands there, stiff, just in front of the door. When she lowers the cup, it’s empty and she’s crunching the ice, a red lipstick print on the side. 

It unsettles him in some subtle way, and the party continues in the same vein. She’s not acting any differently from her usual – still loud, still screechy when she gets worked up, still joking and playing the room, still drinking too much – but he keeps catching glimpses of her in other rooms, her green heels clicking around a corner, or her navy dress billowing as she shifts while talking, unable to keep still under the best of circumstances, let alone while growing steadily more inebriated. Hermann tries not to scowl – he’s surrounded by perfectly pleasant people whom he’s grown to like somewhat in the past several years – but his lips are thin when they’re not pressed to his own glass. 

At the end of the night, Newt is wobbling cheerfully, and her grin doesn’t waver as she fist-bumps their host goodbye. She’s got a smear of lipstick on one of her front teeth, and Hermann barely manages to murmur a civil goodbye as he shakes Durkin’s hand. Newt steps into the small room where their coats have all been piled on a bed and several chairs, and emerges with his hideous green parka (this is iteration three, for which Newt ridicules him frequently. The first one was a gift from the Kaidonovskys, but he made the choice to buy it again. Twice) and her leather jacket. She slips it on over her dress, and somehow that is the most jarring part of the ensemble. It’s one step closer to being the Newt he recognizes, but still settles in some sort of uncanny valley between a feminine stranger and his friend.

They catch a taxi back home because Newt’s feet and Hermann’s hip are killing them respectively, and Newt is freezing from the knees down. She plays Kaiju Krusher on her phone, stabbing violently at the screen with her thumbs. Hermann checks his email. They don’t speak, and neither of them can quite figure out why.

When Newt unlocks the front door, she kicks off her heels immediately and sprawls on the couch. Her skirt gets bunched up around her thighs, and Hermann can see that she’s wearing boxer-briefs. He opens his mouth, closes it again, and then tries to speak. “I’m sorry –” he begins, but Newt cuts him off, says “you’re not sorry, so get out of my living room,” with her eyes closed, her glasses close to falling off her nose. Hermann goes upstairs and lies awake until the sky outside lightens, and does not follow her to work the next day.

It takes two days until they connect again. Newt has holed herself up in her lab; classes aren’t in session, so the lab has a ghost crew of students who live near enough to come in to work or far enough that they didn’t go home for break. When Hermann sees her in passing – as he eats breakfast and she detours through the kitchen to pour the entire pot of coffee into a gigantic travel mug that was surely intended as a joke, as she crosses a street a block away from him on campus, as she staggers in to sleep at 3am – she is back to her normal clothes, tie knotted so sloppily as to barely earn the designation, hair rumpled, trousers worn at the back pocket where she stuffs her wallet. The celebration that night is world-wide, but MIT has a teaching staff of over two thousand, so parties tend to splinter down by field. All the familiar faces of the Bio Engineering faculty are joined by the rest of staff working in Biology, and it’s a huge group that takes over a bar in Somerville. Hermann arrives early, turns up his collar and waits outside. Newt, not unexpectedly, turns up late, indentations from safety goggles still faint on her forehead. She sees him and tries to blow past, but he grabs the sleeve of her jacket, tugs her his way, and after a moment’s hesitation she steps to the side with him.

“Why do you own that dress?” he demands, bare fingers frigid, but unwilling to release the soft leather. Newt presses her lips together, a frown creeping across her forehead, and says nothing. She is not a tall woman, carries most of her bulk around the middle, and he looms over her, a crane in a thick coat.

Hermann kisses her, his January-cold nose pressed against her cheek, and she doesn’t kiss him back. He’s honestly surprised, and when she jerks away from him he lets her go, fingers draped in the air where her sleeve had been. The expression on her face as she barrels past him and into the bar looks almost hurt, not pitying his advance or angry at his presumption, and he genuinely and for the first time in more than a decade doesn’t understand something about her. 

They’re both popular as these sorts of events (they can’t imagine why), and it’s not hard for Newt to avoid Hermann. She throws herself into the party as much as she ever throws herself into anything, which is to say: wholeheartedly and enthusiastically. It isn’t quite the raucous bash they threw the night after they closed the breach (if Newt never again sees Tendo and Allison Choi doing body shots, it will be a crying shame), but the bar’s whiteboard gets requisitioned for extremely competitive hangman, and the loudest group in the building are in the corner playing Werewolf. Fucking MIT nerds. Newt drinks, drinks to forget the last 72 hours of her life, and if she is rude to any of her colleagues by quickly ducking out of any conversations to cross the room, no one mentions it. Hermann flies to Brussels while Newt is still sleeping off her hangover, and if he’s left early, moved up his flight in order to quietly slip out the door without a goodbye, no one mentions that either.

They don’t even try ignoring each other – by this point, Hermann is half of Newt, and Newt is half of Hermann. They have half a dozen research projects in various stages of publication by Geiszler and Gottlieb or Gottlieb and Geiszler, and Vanessa and Newt talk so often that sometimes Newt tells Hermann about Anya’s antics. But Hermann doesn’t come back to Cambridge for nine months, has Newt ship him various books, his watch, a forgotten waistcoat. Newt still talks to him while she’s working, appreciates his travels because it means he’s awake in Moscow while she’s crackling and alert at 3am, filling wells and peering at slides with a crick in her neck. But sometimes she looks at the caller ID on her phone and won’t pick up, can’t pick up, doesn’t.

Newt studiously doesn’t think about Hermann’s most recent visit, the words he said, but she does spend a few of her evenings in dyke bars, coffee shops, nightclubs, buying twice as many drinks for other people as she does for herself. She’s not necessarily looking for someone to take home, but doesn’t argue when it happens, pressing wet kisses against hipbones and thighs and collarbones. She’s no stone butch: she loves to feel good, just loves making other people feel good even more, sometimes doesn’t even get her pants off. She puts more effort into getting dressed, spikes her hair, shines her boots. Some asshole calls her a fat dyke in skinny jeans, and she grins and thanks him, goes home with a man that night and reminds herself how much she loves that too. One of her undergrads spots her in a bar one night, takes a shot for courage and tries to proposition her. Newt stifles laughter, grins kindly and claps the kid on his shoulder. 

As ever, when the work picks up, the fun peters out. She gets a couple booty-calls, enjoys taking the bus home at 2am after a social visit, but as the end of the semester approaches, she stays in the lab more often than she doesn’t. There’s a couch in her office, and she starts keeping deodorant and a fresh set of clothes in a drawer, stumbles up for a few hours of shut-eye before a day of teaching. Hermann has a whirlwind breakthrough while guest lecturing for a month in Oslo and is swept up on a press tour. Newt has a new crew of wunderkinds in the fall semester who actually manage to run her ragged. They talk three or four times a week and goad each other on, forbid the other from succumbing to exhaustion, not that they would ever. After a decade of frantic, life-altering research under the most dire of conditions, their current lives feel relaxing. Maybe hollow. Neither of them tries too hard to eke out more than a sliver of down time here and there. Hermann stays with Vanessa and Anya more often than ever before, and Vanessa looks worried for Newt when they speak, doesn’t ask about the shut door on her second floor behind which lays a chalkboard and a kneeling chair.

They’re both invited to speak at a conference in San Francisco in September, but the semester is just swinging into gear and Newt doesn’t want to take off the ten days. She flips Hermann’s keynote address on a huge monitor in the lab, and all of her grad students and a few of her favorite undergrads crowd into the room, sitting on lab benches and laps to watch. A few of Hermann’s fans, math grad students who follow him around whenever he comes to town, slip into the room as well. They could watch on their own laptops, but there is something about the group of reverent students which makes it somehow heightened, more impactful to them. She stands in the back with her arms crossed over her breasts, a quirk in her lip that settles somewhere between amused and proud.

A week later, Hermann flies into Logan International for five days in Cambridge. He has an award that was presented to the both of them for a recent publication on which they collaborated, and insists that she keep it at her house, that he has no place to put it. Her living room is cluttered with their joint and separate awards already, so it’s really not adding much to the mix. Newt waits by the luggage carousel for him, fingers drumming on her thighs, on the plastic seat she’s perched on, worrying at a bit of loose skin at her cuticles. It takes him forever to appear, and when he does, she can tell that he’s in pain from the long flight. His grip is white knuckled and stiff on the handle of his cane, and he’s permitted a member of airport staff to walk beside him, wheeling his carry on. Newt takes it from the man with her thanks, because Hermann will not offer the same, and grabs his suitcase and garment bag from the carousel without asking which are his. They take a taxi back to Newt’s house without much discussion, and Hermann murmurs appreciatively when she drops his stuff in his room and leaves. It’s only midafternoon, but he’s asleep within minutes. 

Newt sits in her postage stamp of a backyard to read through the latest stack of neurology journals. Having six doctorates usually means she’s neglecting at least three of her areas of expertise at any given time, but her focus on bio-tech and xenobiology for the last dozen or so years doesn’t mean she’s keeping her nose out of other fields of study. One of her students has an article published in last month’s Journal of Neurology and Neurophysiology and it’s taken until now for her to get around to reading the finished piece. She stays out there in the fading fall light until she’s squinting at the diagrams, and then heads inside where Hermann is sitting at the kitchen table, blinking fuzzily to clear the sleep from his eyes. She greets him with lazy, familiar insults and he responds in kind while she runs the tap to cool and fills a glass of water to hand over. They both smile quietly and walk to the couch, Newt detouring by the fridge for a couple of beers.

Hermann is blurred around his sharp edges and Newt can tell he’s taken something for the pain in his hip; it’s not enough to make him loopy, but enough to soften his scowl and smooth out the wrinkles on his brow. She waits for him to settle himself carefully on the couch before curling up on the other side, elbow resting on the armrest and fingers twined around the neck of her beer. She makes a joke about him drinking on top of painkillers, and he asks if she shouldn’t be drinking something stronger, if beer will even affect her at all with the tolerance she’s built up from emulating Hemingway’s creative process for the past twenty years. It’s familiar and it doesn’t sting. Newt smiles and asks about the conference. She falls asleep on the couch while they talk and wakes up when he jabs her side with his cane, jarring her awake long enough to stumble to her bed.

She has work the next day, but cuts out of the lab early, takes a detour on the way home to pick them up Thai food and has the leftovers for breakfast the day after, scarfs down green curry while Hermann is nibbling at his toast, and they walk together to campus. It ends up being a particularly shitty day. Hermann can see the headache building behind Newt’s eyes as she throws away a batch of contaminated samples, two weeks of work down the drain from one mistake. The pain behind her eyes makes it hurt to yell at the student who screwed up, but she does anyway, and then swallows three ibuprofen dry as soon as he’s cowed and left her office. Next, there’s a bureaucratic fuck-up involving one of her TA’s visa, and she has to stand with the kid and testify as to his effectiveness, to explain that the ‘unsatisfactory’ on his record is a mistake, and he shouldn’t lose his visa and get deported. He’s shaking and overwhelmed by the end of the office visit, and she texts his roommate from his phone, bundles him into a taxi and sends him home, waits on campus until she knows he got home safely. She manages two visits from students during her office hours before emailing out an apology and cutting out early, picking up Hermann from the engineering library and going home.  
Newt showers, tosses on sweatpants and a particularly threadbare Mothra tee-shirt and hangs out on the couch to wait for Hermann to come downstairs from his own shower (two years of worrying every time he stays over saw her installing a bar in the shower and another by the toilet, and the peace of mind is worth it). He descends in pajamas buttoned up to his collarbone and swings through the small dining room to pour them each a glass of whisky, but Newt only drinks half before leaving her glass on the coffee table, flops dramatically sideways until her face is mashed into the cushion by his thigh, her glasses shoved sideways and creaking under the strain. He lays a tentative hand on her head and she sighs in relief at the contact, grounding her slight buzz on top of the lingering dregs of a headache. Hermann’s lips twitch and he leaves his hand there for a few moments until he moves it to grab the remote to the stereo. She grumbles quietly at the loss, but his hand returns once he’s switched on the Bach album he knows is in the third slot. They each have their eyes closed, Hermann occasionally humming tunelessly with well-loved measures, and his fingers slowly card through her clean hair.

After twenty minutes, Newt murmurs, “I missed this,” half-hypnotized by the soft repetitive motion against her skull. They’d spent the five years post-Kaiju War operating as two halves of a whole – overlapping into the other’s personal space, pursuing complementary lines of scientific inquiry, handing things off without looking – and the more Newt thinks about it, the more she realizes that they’d spend their decade in interchangeable Shatterdomes doing the same thing. If Hermann had to tape a line down the center of the lab, it was only because Newt freely treated his space like her own and needed a visual reminder as to where the viscera stopped.

“I,” Hermann starts, and stops. His fingers keep moving gently, but he swallows dryly, wets his tongue with whisky to give himself a moment. “I cannot say that I did not intend to hurt you, but I assure you that I did not mean to harm.” The difference is key to him, because a hurt does not last beyond the first barb, but anything that would cut to the quick and stick in her bones is unacceptable. 

Newt twists her mouth and wriggles until her face is no longer smashed against the couch and she is resting on her back with her feet propped up on the arm of the couch. She blinks, resettles her glasses, and looks up at the bottom of Hermann’s chin. Her voice is rusty and low, and is very tired. “I wish you hadn’t done it on Breach Day,” she says, and he hums in quiet acknowledgment, practiced at keeping the hurt out of his voice and projecting calm. They’d always been two halves of a whole, they’d always been on the same page, and Newt doesn’t buy his air of detached professionalism for one second. But she doesn’t open her mouth yet, just sighs and closes her eyes again. Hermann’s hand resettles in her hair and they listen to the music without talking as Hermann slowly finishes his whisky, then slips the sliver of ice left in the bottom of the glass between his lips and crunches it. “That’s bad for your teeth,” Newt murmurs, too tired to be a jerk about it. He flicks her on the forehead anyway and she reaches up and jabs him in the side, unerringly finding a soft spot despite her closed eyes and the fact that she isn’t even facing him. He hisses and flicks her again, harder, and she laughs, finally opening her eyes and tilting her head back to look at his glower. “Obnoxious arse,” he mutters, and she responds with a fond, “you git, you love me anyway,” and he says, resentful and serious, “I do.”

She takes a moment to choose her words carefully. They seem to be teetering at the edge of some canyon, and while there is solid ground behind them and before them, miles below there is a rushing river that slams and crashes everything to bits and pieces, and wears away rock with such patience that the ravine has been getting deeper over the last fifteen years and neither of them know how to deal with it. “I wish,” she begins, and Bach chooses that moment to interject a hopeful trill from the woodwind section. She shakes her head and tries again. “I wish you loved all of me in the same way,” she tries tentatively, “but what we have –” and trails off when Hermann’s scowl deepens. No, that’s not quite right. The river at the bottom of the canyon briefly rushes in her ears. “I bought that dress because I thought you would like it, and I was right. I was angry because I can’t have both parts of me, you and myself, at the same time. You are half of me, Hermann, and I don’t know which half I want to keep.”

His frown could crack the stone at their feet, makes his angular face ugly in its confusion. “I haven’t the faintest idea of what you mean,” he spits, wary beneath his barbs. “Speak plainly.” 

She sits up and swivels around to face him, and the way Hermann’s eyes flicker to the top of her head even in his state of anger makes Newt sure that her hair is sticking up prodigiously. “Why did you kiss me on Breach Day?” she snaps back, meaning ‘I have a hypothesis: because now you know I can look like the woman you want. Because I tried on that persona and it didn’t fit right, it fit like a costume – fun on Halloween, but not what you wear to work and home and out with your friends, but you looked at my heels and my lipstick and my breasts and that, that was the moment you decided to try and kiss me.’ He’d seen her wandering around her house, their house, in boxers and a shirt from sixth grade. He’s been in her mind, he knows the feeling when she slides her fingers beneath the sheets, had done so in her small Shatterdome bunk, wringing out quiet gasps that she stifles in the pillows. He’d been there for a decade of agonizing, beautiful discoveries, weeks where she hadn’t left the lab, days of coffee, mornings where they’d woken up tangled together on the small couch between their desks. He’s spent the last five years orbiting her life, and no one knows how to say one of their names without the other one tacked on anymore, and they haven’t been able to for a decade. What about this stupid fucking dress flipped a switch in his brain, coaxed forth a reaction that she’d previously had to claw from his chest with poison and fire? 

She says it. “Did you kiss me because now you know I can look like a girl?”

“No, I kissed you because I realized that I prefer you this way.”

Newt’s teeth are already bared, ready for the fight she’s picked, but his words leave her breathless instead, a gut-punch she wasn’t actually expecting from him, had never imagined from him. She wheezes out the breath she had drawn to yell and breathes back in again, says, “correct me if I’m wrong, and I am never wrong,” cocky even when staggered, “but aren’t you a heterosexual male of our species?”

Hermann’s lips are thin, and for face as sketched as his, that makes them practically disappear. He is not a communicative man, had always resented having to explain himself to anyone, and feels young and rebellious when sat down and made to talk about his feelings. It was through nothing less than divine intervention and Vanessa’s obvious candidacy for sainthood that coaxed their relationship through a healthy progression and into friendship, and Newt had only gotten through by sheer bullheadedness and a lack of decorum when it came to prying. The granite of his face cracks reluctantly, and his fingers are laced tightly together over the head of his cane, empty glass discarded on the coffee table. “You are not incorrect –” score for her “– but unless you’ve advised a gender shift in the last year and I missed it,” nope, feminine pronouns still work for Newt, “that does not preclude me from being attracted to you.” 

“Well, sure, but I don’t look like Vanessa, or anything.” Vanessa is a staggering sort of beauty who got a degree in chemistry by modelling her way through school. She is tall and willowy and has long natural hair and moves like a dancer. “Or Irina.” He’d had a brief tryst – his words – with one of the jaeger techs in Vladivostok who was small and blond and looked frail right up until she had you pinned against the floor, one arm wrenched behind your back (none of the other pilots tried to get grabby after that). Newt – observant, genius Newt – knows what makes Hermann flick his eyes, and it’s a delicate sort of beauty. She doesn’t have self-esteem issues beyond the inescapable baseline enforced by the western beauty standards, but she is chubby and butch, and with her large nose and messy hair, ‘delicate’ sure ain’t happening. 

Hermann goggles at her, though, the slightly froggy shape of his mouth matched by wide eyes. “You idiot –” great beginning, Hermann. That’s definitely how to tell a girl you like her “– I intended to apologize for accosting you outside of a bar. I certainly don’t need to cosset your aesthetic insecurities when you know very well that you are an attractive woman and that you have been distracting me for the last fifteen years!” It’s certainly no compliment, it’s torn reluctantly from his lips, and he looks like he wishes he could take it back immediately, but Newt’s not going to let that one go any time soon.

She is… she is pretty sure she wants to kiss Hermann. Had always wanted to kiss Hermann. She doesn’t want to touch everyone she likes, but expressing affection through physical contact comes naturally to Newt, and attraction has always stemmed from knowing someone’s personality, their mind, what makes them tick. Hermann’s personality may have always rubbed her the wrong way, gotten into her pores like something caustic, but she knows him, viscerally and tangibly, like she knows herself. There is every reason in the world to not change their dynamic – what they have already works and any change could bring their working relationship, their friendship, crashing and shuddering to a halt – but Newt can’t imagine anything that could separate them, literally. She wakes up from dreams of hospitals she never visited and her hand knows what Hermann’s cane feels like. She speaks two dialects of German, and could with very little refreshing teach any of his graduate classes. She will never stop loving him as much as she loves herself, and Newt has put a lot of work into loving herself. And as for touching, well, she’s always gotten a hard-on for the geniuses, gets a bit hot under the collar when someone’s smarter than her (lord knows that doesn’t happen very often), and Hermann – 

Hermann takes her distracted silence (Newt can think and talk at the same time, thankyouverymuch, just not do that while keeping a filter on what she says, and keeping a handle on this conversation sounds like one of her better ideas) and he invades it, leans in close and overlaps with her, brushing their lips together. His are dry, and Newt cannot help herself and kisses him back. She is addicted to touch, and contact with Hermann is always electric, their brains recalling when they were one and the same, and self-originating impulses traveled along unfamiliar neural pathways. It’s like their nerves are trying to knit together. 

He pulls away with a wary look on his face and she presses, “But I’m not your type,” and he loses the wary look, grabs her by the front of her shirt and growls “you are my partner, you insufferable fool,” then kisses her again. When he finally pulls away and leaves her gasping, eyes wide with shock, she manages to stammer, “So what, do we just use scathing insults as pet names from now on?” and he rolls his eyes with something like fondness. “We’ve always been doing so, Newton,” and she really can’t disagree with him. Her preferred method of demonstrating this kind of affection tends to involve fewer clothes and more orgasms, but she’s too tired and overwhelmed from a shitty day and an evening of emotional revelations – the flesh is so out of it that the spirit is only half-willing, and she’s not assuming their newfound whatever-the-hell-this-is will involve sex. She elects instead to lean up against Hermann, feet flung down the rest of the couch and head tucked under his chin where he spends the rest of the night surreptitiously nosing at her hair while they chat. He doesn’t wake her up when she dozes off, and she blearily cracks her eyes open at one point during the night to discover that he has tucked one arm over her shoulder and across her chest, and she is content.

A night spent sitting on the couch does no favors for Hermann’s hip, and he spends the next day loopy on pain medication and at home, texting her testily every five minutes; she props her phone on the marker ledge in front of her first class’s whiteboards where her students in the front rows can see it light up as each message arrives. She puts it on vibrate when her morning classes are over and leaves it in a steel pan in the lab where it sounds like a furious swarm of bees every time a text comes in, and she cracks up each time. Her grad students each furtively pass her desk at some point during the afternoon, casually casting their eyes to try and see who it is that she’s ignoring, and she cheerfully lets them whisper, too petty and delighted to care. When her students clock out for the day, she surprises herself by leaving at the same time, walking quickly home and bursting in the front door with a toothy grin. Hermann is furious at this point, ignoring her right back, but she swings past the chair he’s sulking in and presses a delighted kiss to his cheek before heading back into the kitchen to cook dinner. She’s half an hour into coq au vin when he walks gingerly into the room, still refusing to meet her eyes, but seats himself at the kitchen table. She’s sure he’s deliberately placed his cane where it will cause her the most trouble, but she spends the next forty-five minutes of kitchen work cheerfully yammering at him about her research and her students until he finally growls a response to one of her statements.

Really, Newt doesn’t know why, but she loves him when he’s angry, and she knows that he loves being angry at her. It works for them, and he grumbles his way through dinner and a glass of wine while she needles him, eggs on his bad mood, but she gets up to refill his wine, to get him water, a second helping of chicken, and her arm is right there when he needs to stand up to walk to the couch with her. 

Weird-ass codependent nerds.

When she asks if they can cuddle on the couch again, he actually hisses at her, and she shrieks with laughter and kisses him, and he grumbles into her mouth but kisses her back. 

Their relationship really doesn’t change very much. It’s just that they invade each other’s personal bubbles slightly more than they had in the past. Or, to be honest, significantly more than they had in the past. It takes another year of making out and fighting and sleeping together and screaming at each other before they take ‘sleeping together’ past the literal meaning, but when Newt comes home late one evening and casually emails Hermann the results of her latest STI screening, he sputters out of the conversation and huffily texts her his own, two weeks later. It’s another two months of horrifically unsubtle sexual innuendo before he has time to visit again, and Hermann rage-quits more than one conversation when she says something filthy in front of a colleague. She does know how to pick an audience – it’s never in front of anyone who doesn’t chuckle appreciatively at the furious faces Hermann makes – so he can’t hold it against her, but he is more than a little frustrated that he can’t _hold it against her_ , “if you know what I’m saying!” (At that one, Hermann signs offline in a huff and doesn’t talk to her for two days, and when he does, takes her to task for her working hours, her methodology, her choice in research projects…) He finds her appearance and presentation no less garish and unprofessional as he ever has. It merely seems that he’s found an appreciation for tasteless posturing and creased button-downs.

When he finally does make it back to Cambridge, they try having sex, and it’s an unmitigated disaster. Which isn’t to say that it’s not good – Newt finally gets a chance to demonstrate her favorite forms of showing affection – but they fuck like they fight, and neither of them escapes unscathed. Hermann taunts her for losing reasonable forms of speech, for babbling incoherently and writhing beneath him, and she finds herself appallingly turned on by his jibes (let’s be honest: they’ve always turned her on). She retaliates with overt enthusiasm that results in her falling off the bed: she clips the nightstand going down and Hermann throws himself towards the edge to look down in alarm, but Newt is wheezing with laughter, one hand pressed to what will be a wicked bump on the side of her head and the other tangled in the sheets she’s dragged down with her. They absolutely do not learn from their mistakes, and more than one orgasmic afterglow is tempered by an icepack or a case of the sulks.

They’re in their forties now, and neither of them looks likely to change any time soon. Hermann racks up frequent flier miles like they’re going out of style and Newt greets each new discovery with sleepless nights and pre-dawn coffee runs, sticking Hermann on bluetooth while she walks from the lab to get enough caffeine to last through the day’s course load and lab work. They go out for dinner one evening when he’s in town and Newt wears lipstick, just for the hell of it (sure, it feels like a costume, but everyone wishes Halloween came more than once a year). Hermann is sure she’s doing it to spite him and purples with rage on the walk home, is spitting mad as she’s going down on him, and hardly deigns to talk to her, even as she’s shaking, gasping, coming apart beneath him. Vanessa audibly worries about her when they talk about it the next week, but Newt is smiling so fondly and contentedly that her friend is reassured, if more confused than ever. 

The year Anya turns eight, Jacob Geiszler dies. He’s hardly seventy-two when heart failure puts him in the hospital, and he refuses to be put on a transplant list, content to die surrounded by friends and family. Newt is shattered but takes no time off work to mourn with her uncle Illia, and Hermann doesn’t visit, doesn’t know what to say. Lars Gottlieb is still hale and hearty, and it seems unfair that the warm and loving father Newt shared freely with Hermann has gone, while his own estranged and cold relation is still ruling over his siblings with an iron fist, loving in his own old world sort of way, but hardly the welcoming sort of comfortable home that Jacob had carried with him for Newt’s entire life. Newt holds it together for the sake of her workload and her students and it lasts two months before she breaks down over breakfast, her tired face slowly collapsing into a grimace, and then tears. Hermann bullies her back into bed, calls her department chair to demand that Newt get the next week off and is met with a sigh of relief and an order for her to take two weeks off. Hermann hastily cancels or reschedules his next several engagements and books them a flight to London where they hole up in Vanessa’s guest bedroom, only occasionally venturing out for walks in the commons and museums. Anya delights in the attention from her father and to finally spend time with her auntie Newt (“what a funny name – are you a lizard princess?” “Well, a newt isn’t actually a lizard, but I’m absolutely a princess.”), and Newt’s ovaries give her a vengeful kick in the biological clock, to which she responds by spitefully consuming vast quantities of alcohol (“like I’d give up drinking for nine months – fat fucking chance”). She gets drunk and cries all over Vanessa’s boyfriend while Hermann and Vanessa are out with Anya. 

When they get back to the states, Newt is dry-eyed, cried out, and the next semester requests only two classes, both graduate seminars, and spends all of her time in the lab with her students and her computers and her work. More weekends than not, Hermann is at her house, at their house, and he comes home one day with a fancy video camera and a huge monitor, and steals half of Newt’s home office to turn into his own, teaches all of his spring classes remotely. His students in classrooms all over the globe have gotten used to Newt tucked in the very corner of the screen, grading or working in less-than-professional attire. She resents not being able to work in her underwear anymore, and retaliates with superhero t-shirts and occasional mugging faces at the camera. She has a competition going with herself to see how often she can get Hermann to shout at her while he’s teaching (she’s up to three). 

Newt has a queen-sized bed, her only piece of furniture that she didn’t trash pick or get from a thrift shop. The mattress is foam, and it’s literally the most comfortable thing either of them has ever slept on. In the summer, Hermann refuses to sleep in Newt’s bed. She puts out heat like a plump, cuddly furnace and Hermann wakes up sweat-soaked no matter how low they crank the AC, so he sleeps in his own room, even if the bed isn’t half as good. But in winter, no matter how far apart they fall asleep, Newt wakes up to find Hermann tucked under her chin, his fine hair tickling her nose and his body covering hers, absorbing as much of her heat as he can. 

She doesn’t know why they work. It’s not because they drifted – it happened before that night in the alley in Hong Kong – but their words fit together even better than their bodies do, their schedules align like clockwork, like some dominant pheromone is matching up their circadian rhythms. She comes home from the lab and makes dinner and he eats before going back into the office to teach a morning class in Tokyo while she edits the procedure section of an article she’s collaborating on. They sleep together and he cooks breakfast while she showers, dresses, spikes her hair, and ignores the plated food he presents her in favor of a travel mug of coffee, but accepts the food in a tupperware container when he shouts at her, says “yes mother, thank you mother,” and darts out of the house with an undignified yelp when he cracks her on the shins. He’s quick with his cane.

Anya visits for the summer when she’s twelve. They’re both in their late forties, which doesn’t feel like it’s possible, but Hermann is going grey with alarming speed and Newt’s face is lined from laughter. They refuse to slow down, but Anya regularly outruns them, finishes her dinner while they’re still working on the salad, roams the streets of Cambridge with a pack of other faculty-kids. She leaves her roller-skates in the kitchen, and there’s a brief slapstick interlude as Newt steps on one and goes down, taking Anya, as well as a pan full of sautéed vegetables, with her. She takes a summer math course and vows to come back to MIT when she’s ready to go to University. 

She does. 

Newt is mostly teaching at this point, still supervising her lab, but leaving the research to people who want to wake up at 2am to check the centrifuge; Hermann spends a few weeks a year as a guest lecturer, but does most of his teaching through holographic interface or webcam. Newt bullies him into taking on a few classes at MIT and most people don’t even notice, assume he’d been working there the whole time, for all that he was glued to Newt and she to him. They buy a bigger house, putting Hermann’s bedroom and his office on the first floor, and Anya suggests putting in a chair lift to the second. Hermann makes a horrified, ugly face, but Newt gets contemplative, starts looking into it. It’s only another three years before Hermann agrees, and Anya is graduating, moving back to London to do her graduate work in Biology. Newt and Vanessa are joyful enough to cry while Hermann glowers proudly.

No, Newt knows why they work. It’s screaming matches at 3am as much as it’s shared moments in the back yard, it’s critiquing each other’s work and cooking together and fighting together and drinking together. It’s the shared lecture they give to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the blue-eyed, black-haired Beckett child in the front row with a shy smile for each of them. It’s how, on the flight home, Hermann falls asleep on Newt’s shoulder and wakes up in pain, and lets her give him a painkiller with a minimum of waspish spite. It’s the tattoo she gets at age sixty, of her glasses and his cane, and the kaiju sticker he lets her put on his laptop. It’s their home and their work and the life they’ve shared and the world they saved.

It’s something like love and it’s something like the drift.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is the first fanfiction I've posted online since age 16. 
> 
> Constructive criticism welcomed - I'll never get better, otherwise!


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